The most devastating number in this case is not a dollar figure and it is not a piece of forensic evidence. It is how old Celeste Rivas Hernandez was when prosecutors say David Burke first found her online.
Who was David Burke before any of this? That is the whole conversation, and Tony and Robin do not take the easy route through it.
He was homeschooled after seventh grade. Gospel music only until thirteen. Almost everything social in his life happened through a screen. His mother pushed him to stop crying about copyright strikes and make his own songs, and two years later he was seventeen, still in high school, and signed to Interscope.
Nobody handles that at seventeen. But the part that stops people cold is what he built alongside the career.
Burke created an alter ego and named him Itami, which is Japanese for pain. He described the character on camera as an agent of chaos, an evil version of himself in a blindfold. The idea came from a manga he was writing about a detective whose alter ego commits murders, murders the detective then has to solve. His own comparison was Tyler Durden in Fight Club.
He put it in the videos. A bloody knife. A woman described as the ghost of the person the character killed. An animated sequence where the character takes an arm. And a video in which Burke drags a body and loads it into a car.
The counterargument matters and it gets its due here: violent art proves nothing by itself, and thousands of artists make it without ever harming a soul.
But prosecutors allege Burke did the exact thing the character did. Tony and Robin follow that line all the way back — the isolation, the money, the industry that sold the darkness and never asked a single question.
Burke has pleaded not guilty. Celeste Rivas Hernandez was fourteen years old.
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